


the yukon

by bluebeholder



Series: the accidental epic [21]
Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Alaska, F/M, Subarctic Adventures, The Yukon, Wolf Behavior
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-29
Updated: 2017-08-29
Packaged: 2018-12-21 10:05:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11941836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebeholder/pseuds/bluebeholder
Summary: It's 1928 and Tina is following Newt around the world as he works on the second volume ofFantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Just now, they're headed north to the Yukon Territory and Alaska in search of the fabled Saber Wolves.Tina's beginning to think that this is the greatest adventure of her life.





	the yukon

**Author's Note:**

> *crashes back into the series after 84 years* HI HELLO HEY IT'S ME 
> 
> *deep breath* Welcome back to The Accidental Epic, I took An Accidental Hiatus because college is starting to happen and this fic Accidentally Got Long and I'm starting to think that my life is basically a series of variously horrifying Accidents. But anyway. Here's Newt and Tina and their subarctic adventures. 
> 
> _YUKON HO!_

Tina is a little disoriented, when she wakes up. She blinks a few times and listens intently, before realizing that the starry sky overhead is enchanted and not real, the sounds are just the Mooncalves chirruping and Occamies snoring, and the weight over her waist is Newt’s arm. It’s still a shock, even after four solid months of travel, to awaken this way.

“Good morning,” Newt says into her hair. Of course he’s awake. Probably has been for hours; the man almost never really bothers to sleep if she doesn’t pull him into bed with her.

“Morning,” Tina says with a yawn, “if you can call it that.”

Newt hums. “Technically, it’s four o’clock,” he whispers.

“I kept Auror hours and even we didn’t call four o’clock ‘morning’,” Tina replies. She turns over and slides down a bit, snuggling into Newt’s chest. They’re near enough to the same height that it’s a bit of work to cuddle properly, but she’s willing to do it.

“Well, I keep creature hours, and this is practically noon for us.” Newt kisses the top of her head. “And you keep creature hours too, so!”

Tina makes a face, hidden from his view by the angle. “I have to remind myself that I don’t regret this,” she mutters.

“I know exactly the face you’re making right now, and it’s very funny,” Newt says, sounding like he’s smiling. He holds her a little tighter. “And I don’t think you could regret this if you tried.”

As they get up and blearily get dressed and eat something that might be pretending to be oatmeal, Tina can’t help but agree with Newt. She can’t regret any of this: not the early hours, not the terrible food, not the irregular schedule, not the danger of getting eaten by a Runespoor or trampled by an Erumpet—none of it. Because for the first time in her life she’s free, really free, with no worries except those of the moment.

And just as important as that is her beautiful Newt. He’s still quiet but so happy, lighting up with a smile every time he sees her. She loves to watch him with his creatures. Just now, while she rakes up the loose leaves that constantly drift into the central plaza, Newt’s off taking steel wool to the rusting copper scales of a family of little frilled lizards—“unnamed, Tina, they’re undiscovered creatures!”—which they’d picked up back in Arizona, saving them from the encroachment of a No-Maj town.

He’s got them in a basket full of warm sand, where they contentedly snap up ants, placid as he picks each up in turn to scour their scales to a bright shine. “Now, I’m very sorry about this,” Newt says to the latest victim, “but you haven’t been burrowing nearly enough in the sand to stay clean, and it’s far too damp in this suitcase…hold still, Helen…”

“Helen,” Tina mutters, shaking her head. Oh, what a name. Not every creature has one, but those that do have such cheerfully mundane names that they become _people_ , instead of lizards and birds and mice. Only Newt could manage something like that.

They’re in Canada now, having left the States far behind. The northern provinces are ahead, with their great vast wildernesses and icy tundras. Newt’s aimed their course for the Yukon, where they’ll use Dawson City as a sort of ‘base camp’ for striking out into the greater area to look for creatures.

“I haven’t spent much time up near the Arctic Circle,” Newt had explained. “That’s why the tundra habitat was empty, except for—her—when I came to New York.” The Obscurus was not mentioned directly. Her last known location was in the hands of Grindelwald in the interrogation chamber of MACUSA, and everyone pretty much presumed that she was gone.

Now they’re on a barge going up the coast from Vancouver, which will take them as far as Skagway in Alaska. From there, they’ll take the White Pass and Yukon Railroad up to Whitehorse, and then a steamboat up the Yukon River to Dawson City. It’s a hell of a trip, but this time there’s no one chasing after them.

“Tina,” Newt calls, startling her out of her thoughts, “are you raking, or just admiring the view?”

Caught, Tina tosses the rake to the ground with a clatter. “Admiring,” she admits cheerfully. “I have a lot to look at!” Ostentatiously, she looks Newt up and down.

Newt turns a little bit red and ducks his head. “Oh, no. I wasn’t being serious…”

Tina steps over the fallen rake and crosses the little plaza to sit down next to him. The polished lizards, tiny copper statues brought to life, skitter in their sand basket. “Well, I was,” she says.

“There’s a lot better things to look at,” Newt says. He points up at the brilliant pink-and-purple bird, Silencing Charm recently refreshed, perched overhead on a branch of the Bowtruckles’ tree. “Like the Fwooper. You could also watch the Mooncalves, they’re sweet…”

“Newt,” Tina says, cutting him off. How can he go from confident to shy so quickly? “I’m just admiring you.”

He doesn’t answer, only runs the tip of one finger around the rim of the basket.

They sit like that for a while, listening to the sounds of the creatures in the suitcase going about their days, never speaking. Tina’s still working Newt out. He’s nothing like anyone else she’s ever met, and she loves him, but she can’t always understand why he is the way he is. Tina sees things in a straight line, A to B to C, while Newt has a habit of going from A to Q and back to B, or skipping off from the alphabet and counting from one to a hundred instead. She can’t keep up with him.

And it isn’t just about the creatures. His moods are mercurial, skidding from delight at a creature or a newly-uncovered spell to disconsolate self-reflection to determined irritation at the world all in the span of minutes. Tina spends most of her time stuck in melancholy and she likes it that way. It’s very safe and she always knows what to expect. Newt isn’t like that. She doesn’t know what sets him off, what pushes him from one to another. Sometimes a compliment makes him light up like the sun, and sometimes it does _this_.

“I’m sorry,” Newt says quietly. “I was just…preoccupied.”

“It’s all right,” Tina says, looking sideways at him.

Newt traces the design woven into the basket, staring at it. “I don’t always know what to do with compliments. They’re nice, when you give them, but…”

“You’re not used to them,” Tina finishes.

“Yes.”

“Neither am I.”

“Everyone tells you how wonderful you are.”

“No, they don’t. I always turn up where I’m not wanted.”

At that, Newt looks mildly alarmed. “That was _Grindelwald_ said that, not someone who likes you.”

Tina shrugs. She thinks about the other Senior Aurors, about the number of times that _Graves_ had said that to her, before everything; about the fact that it had come out of Queenie’s mouth once or twice in the bad times. “Everyone’s said it, one time or another. Point is, I’m just as bad with compliments as you are. We can be awful together.”

Newt lets go of the basket to take her hand in his, long fingers twining around hers. “You’re not awful, Tina.”

“Neither,” she says, leaning over to peck him on the cheek, “are you.”

 

***

 

The morning of their arrival in Dawson City dawns bright and early. They didn’t sleep in the case last night, but in the bed in their room on the steamboat carrying them up the Yukon River. Tina’s come to manage the constant motion, and even to enjoy it. She has fairly good “sea legs”.

She’s perched in front of a mirror now, desperately trying to get her overlong hair in some semblance of something nice. “I don’t know why I didn’t cut this,” she says over her shoulder to Newt.

“Because it looks pretty?” Newt suggests. He’s playing with Pickett on the bed, still shirtless. On any other day, Tina might be distracted—he’s a well-built man, and the freckles all over his shoulders _do_ things to her—but today is exceptional.

“It’s unmanageable! I don’t know how to braid hair, I haven’t done it since I was seventeen and I cut my hair for the first time! And this is too _short_ and there will be bumps and…ugh.”

Newt sighs and lifts Pickett to sit on his shoulder. He stands up and comes to stand behind her. “I can help, I think.”

Tina looks up at him in the mirror. “With what?”

“I can do quite a good braid,” Newt says, combing his fingers through her hair.

She settles back, hands in her lap. “Do your worst,” Tina says, closing her eyes.

It’s really nice, having Newt playing with her hair. He’s gentle but firm, plaiting the messy shoulder-length hair. Occasionally he pauses to pick up a bobby pin and tuck it into place, holding Tina’s fine hair in place. She doesn’t open her eyes, just enjoying the sensation. She suspects it isn’t an accident, when Newt brushes the back of her neck or pauses to run a thumb over the shell of her ear, making her shiver, but he doesn’t actually stop working until the style is complete.

“There,” he finally says, “go on and take a look.”

Tina opens her eyes, blinks a few times, closes them, and opens them again. “Wow,” she says, because she has no idea what else to say. He’s taken all of her hair and pulled it into a low, elegant crown of braids around the back of her head, just as pretty as if she were going to a New York evening party.

“It’s not very much,” Newt hurries to say. His hands, on her shoulders, fidget nervously. “I’ve only ever really done this on Aethonan winged horses—you know there are plenty of wizards in England and Ireland who use them for flying carriages or riding, when they’ve got the permits, and of course there are the races. Everyone likes their horse to look polished, so—”

“Newt!” Tina exclaims, reaching up to take his hands. “This is beautiful. Incredible. I don’t know how you did it. I love it. Honest.”

Newt blinks, and then smiles slowly. “Really?”

“I don’t lie,” Tina says, twisting around to look up at him properly. “I feel wonderful.”

Newt leans down at a precarious angle to kiss her. “Good,” he whispers.

“I’ll have to learn to braid hair so I can do yours,” Tina teases, letting go of his hand to tug lightly on one of his curls.

“Good luck,” Newt says, straightening up with a laugh.

Tina scrambles to her feet. “I’m capable of the impossible, Newt Scamander,” she says, mock-serious. “If anyone can braid your ridiculous hair, I can!”

Newt pauses in the act of pulling his shirt out of the non-expanded side of the suitcase. “I don’t doubt that you can do many impossible things, Tina Goldstein, but there are some things you just can’t tame, no matter how you try.” He has the audacity to _wink_ at her.

“I think I’ve done a damn good job with you,” Tina says smugly, searching around the cabin for her jacket. It may be nearly June in Dawson City, but it’s still barely sixty degrees outside, and after leaving Arizona’s heat behind, the cold will be intolerable.

“You have,” Newt says, pulling his shirt over his head. He meets her gaze briefly, and Tina’s heart flips over. He doesn’t like to look people in the eye—he says that he’s used to avoiding eye contact with beasts because they tend to interpret it as a threat, but Tina knows that people simply make him very uncomfortable—and spends most of his time avoiding gazes altogether. Tina’s gotten so used to it that she doesn’t mind at all. Still, to have him look her in the eye is a great show of trust and love. Tina doesn’t know what she’s done to earn that from him, but she wants to keep earning it forever.

 

***

 

Dawson City is not a city.

It’s a muddy, chaotic, noisy place—a far cry from the Gold Rush boomtown of thirty years before, everyone is quick to assure them—which has small mansions side by side with dilapidated shanties. The Dawson Amateur Athletic Association maintains a cinema, a hockey rink, a boxing ring, and a gymnasium, which Tina eyes speculatively for some practice. There’s a library, of course, a Carnegie. Telegraph and telephone lines occupy poles, and there are definitely modern amenities. Still, this place feels like it’s fallen out of time, as though it’s toppled straight from the past into the present. Tina half expects to see saloon girls in elaborate gowns waiting in the wings, or miners with gold pans coming up the road.

“There’s real industry coming, not just small-time miners,” Newt explains, looking around as they stroll down the sidewalk. “Gold’s still here, only not like it was. People will come back.”

“I can hardly imagine this being bigger than it is now,” Tina says, looking around. A couple thousand people occupy this town, if that.

Newt shrugs. “They’re encroaching on Saber Wolf territory,” he says. “Best if they don’t come.”

They sent an owl ahead with a message to Newt’s contact, who meets them in a restaurant. Tina is reminded violently of Snowshoe, the Wyoming wizard who’d guided them across the Snowy Range last year: this woman is weathered, beaten, and clearly no stranger to a hard life. She’s native, certainly, which interests Tina. She’d never had anything to do with law enforcement in the north—even Graves hadn’t managed to get a branch office established up here, and the Canadian Aurors tended to keep to themselves about this sort of thing. “Emma,” their guide introduces herself, shaking their hands firmly. “Food’ll be out in a minute, I ordered for us all.”

“Good to meet you in person,” Newt says earnestly, sitting down across from her at the table.

“Likewise,” Emma says. She studies them both casually. “A city slicker Auror and a bright blue dandy. Not the couple I’d expect to see out here.”

“I’m not an Auror anymore,” Tina says firmly.

“Good,” Emma says. There’s a moment of silence, broken only by the quiet clatter and commotion of the restaurant around them.

Newt leans forward. “You know where the Saber Wolves are, yes?”

Emma chuckles. “Straight to the point,” she says. “Yes. I do.”

They’re interrupted briefly by the arrival of food. It’s nothing special, holding not even a match to Queenie and Jacob’s cooking—oh, there’s a pang of nostalgia and loneliness, best not to think of them—but it’s better than whatever they’ve been eating in the suitcase.

“The Saber Wolves are shy,” Emma says, when all of them have devoured half the food on their plates. She takes another bite of potatoes and adds, “Finding them isn’t easy.”

“Finding most creatures isn’t easy,” Newt points out. “We’re willing.”

“All right,” Emma says. She shakes her head. “We can set out today, if you’d like.”

“We would,” Tina says, leaning forward a bit. This is the good part, the part of these adventures that she likes best. “Lead the way.”

 

***

 

The wilderness of the Yukon is very…big. Tina’s not sure how it manages to give the impression of being larger than any other wilderness Newt has hauled her through so far, but it feels like there should be giants out here. The trek to Saber Wolf territory takes a week and a half over rough terrain, and by the time they’ve arrived at the site Emma’s marked as the center of Saber Wolf territory, Tina has six new blisters and has forgotten what it’s like not to have aching calves.

They stop eventually, having hiked all the way across the border of the Territory of Alaska and into Mount McKinley National Park. The territory of the pack of Saber Wolves they’re seeking encompasses a huge area of the park, including Mount McKinley itself. Emma advises them to set up camp at the edge of a forest, from which they can see the mountain peak and the foot of an enormous glacier. “I’ll come back for you in two weeks,” she says. “I’m going to Fairbanks.”

“What business?” Tina asks. Newt’s erecting the tent, distracted; it falls to Tina to take care of logistics for the moment.

“Talking to the native leadership about the two of you,” Emma says candidly.

That’s unexpected. “What?”

“Standard procedure in cases like these,” Newt calls out, snapping his wand to send tethers whipping around trees, tying themselves to keep the tent upright. “They’ll want to make sure I’m not doing anything but observing while I’m out here.”

Emma nods in agreement. “The Tanana chiefs have no interest in letting some loose-cannon wizard go among the Waheela,” she says. “That is, for you English-speakers, Saber Wolves.”

“Good call,” Tina says. She pauses. “I didn’t know there was a magical tribal government up here in the Territory.”

“There isn’t,” Emma says, smiling. “I meant the Tanana chiefs, not some secret MACUSA-style government.”

For half a second, Tina thinks her head is going to explode. “You’re just going to go and talk about wizardry with No-Majs!?”

Newt comes up and plants a hand firmly on her shoulder. “She is, because the rest of the world doesn’t think that the Statute of Secrecy is the be-all end-all of life,” he says.

“We don’t hold with MACUSA much up here,” Emma says.

Tina reminds herself that her sister is in love with a No-Maj, and she’d broken the Statute of Secrecy herself, and breathed a little easier. “Secessionists?”

“‘Secession’ would mean we were ever really a part of MACUSA to begin with,” Emma says with a wink. Newt laughs, and Tina smiles widely. There’s something to be said for meeting the like-minded people in this world.

 

***

 

“Waheela are supposed to hunt in family groups of two or three,” Newt says, handing Tina a page of chicken-scratch notes. “Any we see will probably have a litter of pups; if they’re anything like the wolves in this region, the pups will be between four and five months old.”

“…which means?”

“That they’ll be bloody _adorable_ ,” Newt says with a grin. “In practice, though, they’ll just be learning social behaviors and practical skills. There’s _definitely_ a group active in this area; hunters keep turning up moose kills. These are very large predators…”

Tina nods slowly. She pokes at the fire with a stick. They’ve set it at the entrance to the tent, not that it would keep out a determined predator, but it’s a reassurance all the same. “Are we ever going to pursue something that isn’t a deadly man-eater?”

Newt rolls his eyes. “There’s never been a documented case of Waheela eating a human being.”

“Because no one survived the attack to document it!” Tina says, clutching at her heart dramatically. Newt flings a twig at her and Tina bats it away, laughing. “Really, though, Newt, how dangerous are these wolves?”

“No more dangerous than an Erumpet or a Nundu, honestly.”

“ _Newt_.”

“I mean it!” He stares off into the darkness. The firelight catches on the sharp angles of his face and turns his hair to gold. He could be a painting. “Any creature has the ability to hurt someone, if it wants. Most of them don’t want to. It’s only when someone attacks them first. A bear probably won’t attack you—unless it’s a mother and you bother its cubs. Poison dart frogs are brightly colored so that you know they’re dangerous, and you stay away. And so on.”

Tina points at his bright blue coat. “Is that why you’re brightly colored?”

He turns a positively beatific grin on her. “You’re so very intelligent,” he says. “I don’t know why you stay around a dunce like me, honestly.”

“Oh, for Bridget Bishop’s sake,” Tina mutters. “You know very well how smart you are!”

“I do,” Newt says. He looks down and pokes the fire in his turn, a faint blush spreading across his cheeks. “I just think that you’re smarter.”

Exasperated, Tina gets up and circles around the fire to sit down next to him. “I’m not the one who’s out here knowing everything there is to know about the Waheela,” she says.

“Not everything!” Newt protests. “That’s why we’re here to observe them!”

As if to punctuate his words, there’s an eerie howl, somewhere out in the darkness. Tina sits bolt upright, drawing her wand in a split second on pure instinct. Newt doesn’t move an inch except to cock his head, listening.

“Waheela?” Tina asks, eyes wide.

“Yes,” Newt says. “They really are here.”

 

***

 

The days whip by. Tina’s time on stakeouts comes in handy: she has more patience than Newt for laying in the underbrush, watching a mother moose and her babies browsing, or for hiding for hours in a shelter overlooking a fresh kill site while they wait to see if the Waheela come back. Newt prefers to move, tracking the creatures on foot. She can barely keep up with him, and some days doesn’t see him at all when she spends a whole night in a hide and Newt spends the whole day following trails through the forest. It’s fun. She’s finally making use of skills she had as an Auror but never really got to use because Graves had always been a bit cautious with her, until after Grindelwald.

It’s surprising, too, how much attention Newt pays to the non-magical flora and fauna. When Tina brings him a day’s worth of observations on the behavior of ptarmigans—which she wrote out because she got bored sitting on a cold wet creek bank for hours on end—he’s practically ecstatic.

As their time in the wilderness draws to its end, they decide to head up to the glacier and see what they can find up there. It will be cold and snowy, even though it’s summer here, but they bundle up well anyway. Newt sidetracks them for a bit, when he pauses in the act of tying off Tina’s scarf to kiss her on the nose and she retaliates by just kissing him, but they get out eventually.

“It’s beautiful up here,” Tina says, looking up at the face of the glacier. They’re not up on the glacier, only on the snowy moraine leading up to the foot of it. Above them, the ice is blue, from the pale blue of glass through a bright blue that looks like Newt’s coat all the way into a blue so dark it’s almost indigo, and it’s all covered over with white snow that sparkles with a crust of ice in the sun. Their breath steams and clouds in the air.

“This is the other good part of the job,” Newt says, pausing to turn and look out over the valley they’ve been camping in. “The views are always nice.”

Tina grins at him, waiting until he glances at her to look him up and down. “Right?”

Newt sweeps up a handful of snow and throws it at her. “Tina! Look for the Waheela, not me!”

The snow splashes on her coat and under her scarf and Tina shrieks with cold. She picks up snow of her own and hurls it at Newt, who just barely ducks, and then tosses more at her. They don’t bother packing snowballs or pulling out wands, only hurling snow at each other like children, laughing and shouting. Tina trips over jags in the rock and ice, stubbing her toes; Newt’s face turns red with exertion until he’s completely out of breath.

On a wide, flat rock whose cover of snow has mostly melted away, they collapse side by side. “I haven’t had a snow fight in so long,” Tina says, between pants.

Newt takes her hand and squeezes it tight. “It was wonderful,” he says breathlessly. “You’re wonderful. I don’t know how I ever traveled without you.”

Tina freezes. “…what?”

“I mean it,” Newt says, rolling onto his side to look at her. He’s serious now, watching her with a steady gaze. “I like being out here with you.”

“I like being out here with you too.”

“It’s different when I’m not alone.”

Gently, Tina brushes one of his loose, snow-wet curls out of his eyes. “I’m glad you like having me around,” she says.

Newt is just leaning in to kiss her when there’s a howl from further up the slope. Instantly, they both freeze. It’s a familiar noise—not a wolf howl, not a bear roar. “Waheela,” Newt says.

Tina sits up and looks. The howl comes again, and she hears something different in it, a sort of a whimper. And it’s not the mature howl they’ve been hearing. “That’s a _baby_ ,” she says, shocked.

In half a second Newt is on his feet. “Now’s our chance,” he says, and then he’s scrambling over rocks and ice and snow with Tina on his heels.

They climb five hundred feet over the rough terrain before Newt nearly stumbles right into the Waheela pup. A sudden crevasse appears right in front of them, neatly hidden by projecting rock and a cover of snow on all sides, and down below them—

“It’s _stuck_ ,” Tina says in horror.

The Waheela pup is nearly as large as a retriever or a Labrador, but still recognizably a baby. And it is certainly stuck, one leg caught between two rocks, struggling to pull itself out and failing.

Newt drops to his knees. “I think I can get it out,” he says. “Just—not with a wand yet, I don’t think, I could cause the whole area to collapse—”

“Work fast then,” Tina says, and watches from the side as Newt leans down to begin soothing the pup so he can get it out.

She’s not even sure he hears the low growl behind them.

Slowly, Tina turns, and her heart begins to pound.

There are five _huge_ Waheela, bigger than the grizzly bears they’ve seen before, facing her. They’re not wolves, not truly: their faces are too short and their fangs are too big, two huge saber teeth projecting out over their lower jaw, and they have claws like bears. All of them have their ears up and teeth bared, and one—the largest of them, a female with shaggy dun-gray fur and whirling golden eyes—is growling, low and steady. She sees another puppy hanging back, watching all of this with curiosity.  

“Newt,” Tina says.

“I hear it,” he says, frighteningly calm. “We’re intruders. And I’m touching one of their pups.”

“What do I _do_?”

He doesn’t even look up at her. “They’re more intelligent than regular wolves,” he says, still in that steady voice. She’s not sure who he’s calming: her, the pup, himself, or the rest of the Waheela. “You have to show your strength.”

Tina forces herself to be calm. Nerves of steel. These are the nerves of steel she’s been practicing, the nerves that she’s watched people she admires use. Newt’s got them, Graves has got them, and now it’s her turn. The Waheela are showing their teeth—she’ll show hers. She pulls out her wand, holding it ready at her side, and bares her teeth at the lead beast.

Bad move. The Waheela leader barks sharply and she takes a single step forward.

“Tina,” Newt says, and there’s an edge of fear in his voice. The pup he’s helping whimpers.

Mirroring the Waheela, Tina takes a step forward. “No!” she snaps at the beast, like she’s scolding a bad dog. “We’re not doing anything wrong!”

The Waheela barks again, showing all her teeth. Tina plants her feet in the snow and thinks frantically of spells she can cast that won’t drop the whole area into a sudden new crevasse. She holds her wand arm out, ready to fire, trying to make herself look bigger.

There’s a scrabbling and a yelping to her side. “I’ve almost got it,” Newt says.

Slowly, as if she’s going to pounce, the Waheela paces forward. Tina stares the Waheela down as she draws near. They’re possibly five feet apart at most now, virtually eye to eye. The great beast is still growling, a steady thrum of noise that makes Tina want to turn and run. But Newt’s on the ground and she has to protect him.

And then Newt yelps and the Waheela puppy bursts out of the crevasse, hurtling into the safety of its pack. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Newt begin to rise. The Waheela female’s head snaps around and she moves and before Tina can think about what she’s doing she steps right between Newt and the Waheela.

“ _Leave him alone_!” Tina shouts. The Waheela lets out a howling bark and shakes her great head, snapping her teeth, but Tina isn’t going to be deterred now. She takes three steps forward, blood pounding in her ears. “He’s _mine_!”

The Waheela stares at her, teeth still bared, and Tina has no idea what to do except to growl herself, the sound tearing out of her throat, absolutely ridiculous from a human mouth, but the Waheela stops anyway. She studies Tina, staring at her, and Tina doesn’t back down.

Finally, after the longest ten seconds of Tina’s entire life, the Waheela relaxes. She doesn’t exactly show her throat, but she steps back and sniffs at her pup, which appears to be only slightly bruised. The other Waheela take their cue from their leader, sniffing the air curiously and watching Tina and Newt with far less rancor.  

And then, just like that, without sparing the two wizards a second glance, the Waheela are gone, trotting off down the moraine back toward the valley and the shadows of the forest. Tina watches them go, only just now realizing the sheer stupidity of what she just did. She sinks to the ground, not caring that she’s sitting in a snowbank, and inanely considers writing a letter to Graves apologizing for ever thinking that she’s less of an idiot than he is.

“Merlin’s Beard,” Newt says, sounding a little strangled. “Did you…did you actually do that?”

“Pinch me, I think I was dreaming,” Tina says with a hysterical little giggle. She looks at Newt and finds him staring at her with wide eyes.

Newt shakes his head. “That was amazing,” he says.

“Amazingly stupid,” Tina says.

“No, just amazing,” Newt says. He leans over and buries her in a hug and Tina tries to fight off the absurd urge to cry into his coat. It doesn’t work very well. “Come on. Let’s get off this glacier.”

 

***

 

When they’re both dry, and Tina has mostly stopped shaking, they just lie around in the sun for a bit. Tina contemplates a career change to being a hat-maker or something similarly tedious. Newt works on his notes, of which he has many.

“They do act more like wolves than expected, with pack behavior and all that,” he says. The scratch of his quill is the undertone of his words. “But I do think they’re more intelligent. I got the sense that she understood what you were doing, protecting your mate and all that.”

“I hope it was clear,” Tina mutters.

Newt laughs. “You shouted about me being yours,” he says. “It ought to be, certainly.”

Tina rolls over on her stomach and stares at the blades of grass. “What are you classifying these as? I’d vote for a new classification, six X’s, for ‘absolutely no one should ever come to Alaska again’.”

“No, I was thinking about four X’s,” Newt says. “A skilled wizard may handle the creature. Like you did.” He sets down his journal and begins running his fingers through her hair.

“We almost _died_.”

“We did not.”

“We did!”

“Well, anyway,” Newt says, “I did discover something rather more important than the behavior of Waheela when we were up there.”

Tina looks up at him, squinting because he’s sitting right in the path of the sun. “Which was?”

Newt smiles. “That you’re really very hot when you get all fierce and protective like that.”

“Oh,” Tina says, feeling herself blush. Newt leans down to kiss her, and from there things turn much, much less innocent. They’re going to have sunburns in awkward places later, and Tina doesn’t care at all about it. She’s perfectly happy, right here, with Newt.

Maybe she isn’t going to change careers, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> GETTING TO SKAGWAY WAS TOUGH. The Alaska Inside Passage and the ALCAN weren’t there in 1928, and most overland travel was sketchy at best. I couldn’t find information about exactly how you’d get from Vancouver up there, so I just said “forget it” and went with a barge.
> 
> The story of Dawson City is largely told through the project “Dawson City: Frozen Time”. In 1929, hundreds of film reels chronicling the history of Dawson from the Gold Rush through the 1920s were buried under the city’s hockey rink, left there and preserved until they were dug up on accident in 1978. Since then, they’ve provided a record of an often-forgotten and poorly-recorded period of Dawson’s history. I’ve drawn from them to paint a picture of the Dawson City Newt and Tina enter in this tale. 
> 
> In 1928, the park would have been “Mount McKinley National Park”, since it was not the “Denali National Park and Preserve” until the 1980s. Interestingly, the name of the mountain itself was not officially recognized by the federal government as “Denali” until 2015, when President Obama used statutory authority to require a change that the US Board on Geographic Names had been resisting since the park’s name was changed. (The Alaska state Board of Geographic Names had already recognized the mountain under its real name.)
> 
> Organized leadership of native groups in this region of Alaska existed as early as 1915, when a group of chiefs came together to protect a burial ground in Nenana from the Alaska Railroad. Eventually, the group would become the modern Tenana Chiefs Conference, which continues to advocate for native voices in the region. 
> 
> A final note on etymology: “hot” as in “sexually attractive” has been around…for a while. In Henry IV Part 1, Act 1 Scene 2, Prince Henry gives us this gem: “What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day? Unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping-houses, and the blessed sun himself a **fair hot wench in flame-colored taffeta** , I see no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand the time of the day.”


End file.
